‘But not at the very front. If we’d been there they would have killed us.’
At the place where wide Jerusalem Avenue narrowed onto the Poniatowski Bridge, her group – who ranged in age from nineteen to seventy-three years old – turned to face the crowd. They unfurled their long banner and blocked the march. ‘Faszyzm STOP! ’ it read in bold, red and black, hand-painted letters. Stop fascism!
Around them the crowd juddered to a stop. Two nationalists immediately tried to tear away the banner so the women – wearing woolly hats and Polish armbands – sat down on the pavement. Skinheads cursed them as terrorists, whores, enemies of Poland. A woman held up a cross and shouted: ‘Satan is here in the world.’ A man in battle fatigues radioed for back-up and within two or three minutes half a dozen heavies in balaclavas – perhaps from the right-wing Ruch Narodowy or Legionaries of Christ – mustered around them. They towered above the women with fists clenched, hurling abuse at them for dishonouring the national day. Red smoke rose from the spitting flares and stung their eyes but the ‘Dirty Fourteen’ – as they would become known – held their ground, kept on chanting, punching the air in determination.
‘Precz z faszyzmem!’ Down with fascism!
In their anger two of the hooded men started to drag away the encircled protesters, pulling on parka hoods, grabbing arms and legs. One of them, Kasia, was dropped, hit her head and lost consciousness. Another, Elzbieta, was kicked repeatedly in her back. The others again broke free, linked arms and lay down together to sing ‘Prayer at Sunrise’, their voices quivering with fear. In response the men began to spit at them, shouting more right-wing slogans, their rage drowning out the women’s chants.
‘Death to enemies of the homeland! Glory to Great Poland!’
In the crowd most families and couples looked on, passive and unthinking; some laughed, one or two snapped photographs, others simply turned away.
‘We were alone,’ recalled Kryśka.
In a handful of years, encouraged by PiS tolerance of nationalist factions, the Warsaw march has become the world’s largest gathering of far-right extremists, drawing fascists from across Europe, Britain and the United States. Kryśka’s protest went unreported on government-controlled channels, despite having been filmed by national television. Compliant news editors concentrated instead on Poland’s interior minister praising the march as ‘a beautiful sight’.
‘We are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday,’ he said on air.
‘Meanwhile we’ve been charged with obstructing a lawful assembly. Can you imagine?’ Kryśka told me, back on the street after thirty years, fighting once again for her beliefs. She knew that freedom couldn’t be taken for granted, that one had to be vigilant and be ready to act. ‘This is a European disease. Unfortunately in my country it is very severe.’
In Warsaw’s New Town, on the edge of the infamous ghetto in (or from) which earlier fascists had killed almost half a million Jews, I wondered if an entire nation could be stupid?
After my morning with Kryśka, I needed time to put her story into perspective. A milk bar – a dirt-cheap, canteen-style holdover from an earlier age – seemed a good place to start, unchanged as it was from my last visit and still serving bargain-priced bigos, a smoked sausage stew that, the Poles say, ‘walks into the mouth’.
At the till the proprietress – in spotted purple pinafore and slippers – took my order. I passed the receipt through the tiled kitchen hatch. Behind a modest half-curtain three women in sleeveless blouses circled a heavy range, stirring pots, singing along with a song on the radio. A sparrow darted through the open door and alighted on the dirty dishes at a second, scullery window. When one of the cooks called out my order, pushing the plate out of the hatch, I found a metal chair at a melamine table beneath a bare light bulb and opened Czesław Miłosz’s A Book in the Ruins.
‘How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt / Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt / Real people,’ the poet and philosopher had written in 1941 near to my unchanging milk bar. ‘How is it that your breasts / Are pierced by shrapnel…?’
In wartime Warsaw the Nazi occupiers had kindled a funeral pyre in the ghetto, wrote Miłosz, yet,
In the square beyond my cafe window, an amusement park carousel had turned to the strains of a carnival tune, drowning out the salvos from behind the ghetto wall.
After the war, Miłosz had pondered the question of national stupidity, and the difference between the European and Anglo-American experience. In Europe ‘the Spirit of History’ had devastated the continent, ‘wearing about his neck a chain of severed heads’ and instilling a profound understanding of impermanence. In contrast non-Europeans had had a radically different war. Americans and Brits had been spared the wholesale destruction of their homeland and so continued to take for granted the permanence of their way of life. Now over a milky bar mleczny coffee, I wondered if national stupidity had come to have more to do with time than geography? With the passing of years, and the men and women who’d lived through the conflict, Poles (like Hungarians) had also begun to forget the twentieth century’s bloody lessons.
Kryśka had never been a bystander, never laughed on a carousel while catching singed petals in mid-air. She continued to take risks, guided by her individual conscience. She took to the streets when photographs of six opposition politicians – who’d had the ‘audacity’ to vote against the government – were strung from a makeshift gallows in a public square. She drew attention to the means by which the ruling party extended its power. She demonstrated against its stringent abortion laws, enacted so as to secure the support of the Church (which demanded, for example, that doctors use the word ‘baby’ rather than ‘foetus’ even in the earliest stages of pregnancy). She saw it as her moral duty to protest against the systematic undermining of the legal order.
Yet for all her patriotism, all her dreams, I wondered if she was an exception.
‘I – like many others – took advantage of the new opportunities after 1989. I profited from freedom,’ she had admitted to me that morning: calm, dignified and compassionate. New opportunities and strong economic growth had shielded her – and many Poles – from the economic crisis. ‘But I see now that others were less fortunate than me. I regret that I didn’t have my eyes more open, that I didn’t do more for them.’ She’d paused and I’d noticed a frailness in her eyes. ‘Poles are not stupid but we are uneducated: two hundred years of captivity during the Partitions, two world wars, seventy years under the Soviets, and now thirty years of galloping and unfair capitalism. We are not educated in democracy at all.’
In the milk bar the proprietress’s slippers shuffled across the black-and-white checked floor, plates clattered into the sink, coins clinked into the till. I left the place empty but for a retiree in a felt hat and the sparrow, which the proprietress swept back onto the street.
In the late afternoon I circled Warsaw’s unloved Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin’s unforgettable 1955 ‘gift of friendship’ to Poland. Its towering bulk and two of its stone-faced agitators – including a sightless author gazing towards a better tomorrow – were etched in my memory. Inside the socialist realist building, casinos and stylish shops now lined the endless marble hallways. The Marxist theatre troupes and Polish Academy of Socialist Scientists had been consigned to history.